Top 10 Gadgets

10. Nokia Lumia 1020

Harry McCracken / TIME

Every modern wireless phone is a cameraphone, but this Lumia is something new: a phonecamera. Its oversized sensor packs 41 megapixels of resolution; you can capture the most detailed phone snapshots you’ve ever seen, and zoom in without reducing your pictures to a blocky mess. (You have to download the high-res versions to a computer via USB cable, but it’s worth the effort.) Even iPhone and Android fans who thought they couldn’t care less about Windows Phones might find themselves smitten with this one.

9. Leap Motion Controller

Leap Motion

This pint-sized USB accessory for Windows PCs and Macs is an $80 preview of where man-machine interfaces may be headed. Plug it in, plop it on a flat surface, and you can perform tasks — from playing games to reading New York Times stories — by waving your hands in the air. It can even detect the angle your palms and how many fingers you’re sticking out. The technology is also being built into laptops, starting with HP’s Envy17 Leap Motion SE.

8. Nest Protect

Nest Labs

Silicon Valley startup Nest Labs specializes in making the most mundane household devices a lot less mundane. In 2012, it introduced a Web-savvy touch-screen thermostat. And its new product is Nest Protect, a $130 smoke and carbon-monoxide detector. Rather than emitting an eardrum-shattering squeal, Protect alerts you to hazards in a calm female voice which says helpful things like “There’s carbon monoxide in the den.” If it mistakes your smokey cooking for a fire, you can set it wise with a wave of your arm.

7. Amazon Kindle Fire HDX

Amazon

Amazon’s third-generation Kindle Fire tablets — a $239 seven-inch model and a $379 8.9-incher — are the first ones which felt truly polished and pleasing from the day they debuted. As always, they make it as simple as possible to consume mass quantities of Amazon content — video, music, books, games and more. And they’ve got one feature that’s a ground-breaking dazzler: Mayday, which lets you get tech support from a real live Amazon rep who appears on screen and can take control of your tablet.

6. Microsoft Xbox One

Officially, Microsoft’s Xbox One is a game console, but its aspirations go far beyond play. With built-in video calls via Skype, integration with cable and satellite TV boxes and an interface derived from Windows 8, it’s really a living-room PC. The most intriguing technology is built into the new Kinect sensor, which understands spoken commands, recognizes faces and can even measure your heart rate. Some aspects of the One are still rough around the edges, but it’s going to be fascinating to see where it goes.

5. Apple iPhone 5s

iPhones with an “s” at the end of their model numbers are supposedly snoozers, because they focus on refinements to the previous year’s model. But the iPhone 5s introduces two of the best smartphone features which Apple or anyone else has ever come up with. The Touch ID sensor lets unlock your phone with a quick press of your finger or thumb. And the camera sports a unique dual-LED flash which provides subtle, custom lighting for an array of picture-taking scenarios.

4. Pebble Smartwatch

Pebble

Whether smartwatches ever turn into a booming business to rival smartphones or tablets remains anyone’s guess. But Pebble is off to a promising start. The $150 wearable gizmo acts as a satellite for your iPhone or Android handset, receiving snippets such as text-message notifications via Bluetooth and displaying them on its power-efficient E Ink display. Third-party developers can write programs to let it do everything from playing games to tracking your fitness. Did we mention that it tells time?

3. Oculus Rift Development Kit

Virtuix Omni / YouTube

At the moment, Oculus Rift is only available in a $300 kit aimed at game developers. But once you strap on this virtual-reality headset onto your noggin and experience it in action, you’ll get itchy for the consumer release, which is scheduled for 2014. Used with a PC or Android device, Rift will let games create 3D worlds which surround you — you can even look over your shoulder for enemies lurking behind. If the games live up to the hardware’s potential, it could be an epoch-shifting landmark.

2. Apple’s new iPads

Apple

Do you want a powerful iPad or a portable one? How about both? At just one pound and .29-inch thick, the 9.7-inch iPad Air is much svelter than previous full-sized models. And except for the smaller screen, the 7.9-inch iPad Mini with Retina has almost exactly the same potent components as its big brother, as well as the same ten-hour battery life. Both benefit hugely from the App Store’s 475,000 iPad-optimized apps. It’s best tablet you can buy, in two convenient sizes.

1. Google Chromecast

Jared Newman for TIME

Instead of trying to do everything — like Google’s famously ambitious and unsuccessful Google TV — this thumb-sized gizmo does one thing, does it as simply as possible and does it for the impulse-purchase price of $35. Plug it into one of your TV’s HDMI ports, and you can fling videos and other content from your laptop, tablet or phone to the big screen, no wires involved. Lots of companies have built devices to do this; Chromecast is the first one that gets it right.

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I personally own both consoles and am going to now create a list saying what is true and what is not.

-This should not be a topic here, it doesn’t matter if one is more sold out than the other, that does not affect the user experience. There are so many reasons why one console is sold out and the other is not. Companies could be lying, they could not be giving enough of a supply to demand, etc.

-PS4 has horrible online connectivity issues, the still have problems with the pay-to-play psn network thing they just put up. That was expected due to the fact that sony just introduced the pay-to-play thing. But they should have been more prepared, they could have extended the release spent more time. Other than a few gimmicks, xbox online service is doing fine, so Im going to say they win this war.

-Xbox has a higher rate of failure with the disk drive, Playstation with the bricked consoles. I'm going say they came even on this.

-Xbox is made for entertainment all round, the whole family and a gamer. The Playstation is more for a gamer, for now, only because of their line of available titles to play. Xbox will catch up eventually with the titles but for now the PS4 takes the lead on the gaming side.

-The Xbox does output at 1080p natively, some games do not run at 1080p due to their developers not allowing them to do so. The Playstation outputs at a native 1080p as well. Sometimes, on both consoles, there might have been errors to make the game run at 720p but those have been fixed. But for now I am going to say that the Xbox and Playstation both are equal on this topic. Although there are a few more titles on the Playstation that run at 1080p, so that might have a little effect on some people’s opinions.

The Xbox should be on this list due to fact of the Kinect, those guys that say it takes like 2 to 3 times to actually work, they must have been speaking as a two year old kid who is just learned to speak or they were being dumb and forgot to change their language settings. It seems to work fine for me, works right on time. It is innovative and is pretty cool if you stand back and take a look at both consoles, if you are not a gamer - you never played a console in your life - never heard of the xbox and playstation. The Xbox is also an entertainment console, people that don’t game 24/7 actually want to watch TV, do other stuff - the Playstation doesn’t offer that. The Xbox also has more features, an internal capture card, skype, multitasking, etc.

On the other hand the Playstation has more of the mid for a gamer perspective. It sticks to it’s roots of a console, a gaming console - where you play games and don’t go absurdly off and do stuff like watch movies and skype. It is also more powerful, better hardware and stuff. Although at the end it doesn’t really matter if you have better hardware or not.

In this thing I was not choosing sides, no biost opinions and other here, I am neither a Playstation nor a Xbox fanboy. I am more of a PC gamer although I did come from consoles.

Chromcast only works well in the USA. A small market compared to the rest of the world. It should not be number one on your list if it is only in a small market like the USA. Put it in the Chinese market and then I will be impressed.

@MarkHefner Yeah the USA is totally a small market. It's only the largest internet market in the world both monetarily and by data usage. It's got the second most internet users by country and it's Google's largest market by a huge margin. Google only has a 3% market share in China. Why would they even care about how well Chromecast does on the Chinese market?

@MarkHefner Plus Google only recently made Chromecast available in Europe, but hasn't officially launched it internationally as of yet. No surprise that it works well in the only country that it has been launched in .

Yeah, I'm cool with the list minus that Apple stuff... put some good tech in there like 3DR drones or micro cancer technology... that's amazing stuff... Apple? Not so much... rather run of the mill... which a top 10 list should not have included within.

@dukezap1 SORRY MAN BUT I GOT TO SAY THIS CAUSE NOBODY SAID IT YET. I AM NEITHER A PLAYSTATION OR XBOX FAN. PLAYBUTTS ABOVE AND BELOW WATCH OUT XBOX NATION. WHAT THE HELL GUYS THIS IS ABOUT TOP TEN GADGETS OF 2013 NOT ABOUT THE DAMN XBOX AND PS4, WHICH IS BETTER.

The Leap Motion was such a major disappointment, it should not be on this list! The leap is gimmicky at best. I pre-ordered one of these, waited through the delay they had. The poor communication during shipping. And then when I finally got it, it sucked. It has been sitting in a bag, untouched since a couple weeks after I got it. Maybe they have released some better responding apps since then. But all in all, not the Minority Report style interaction that was promised/advertised.

Where is the HTC One, where is the Moto X? Why are the iPhone and the iPad on the list? Just because Apple is the only company that manages to fool it's customers with the same phone every year, while other's can't?

@osiris355Location of assembly is irrelevant as to whether something is a "top gadget". Custom color configurations are neat, but again, I'm not sure that being able to get a smartphone in pink is enough to make it a "top gadget" of the year.

Reviews for the Moto X have been pretty mediocre. Engadget concluded their review of it with: "The price is just too darn high for what's on offer. In a market where phones with higher-res displays, greater storage and faster processors are a click away for $199, the Moto X just can't compete".

Even with gimmicks like "wrist flick to camera", that doesn't sound like one of the ten best gadgets of the year.

If you did more research on the voice smoke detectors it is pretty important. Studies show children don't wake up to the alarms and instead only wake up to human voices. I think we're going to be seeing much more about voice alarms in the future. It is a pretty critical discovery and has the opportunity to save children's lives.

Wow. No PS4 (which is rocking the Xbox One right now) - No HTC One (which won phone of the year) This list is sad. The fact that not one but TWO Apple devices made this list (The new Iphone being called a disappointment and an incremental update, by even by the most fervent of apple followers) and the Nest (really now? A smoke detector for 130$ that looks nicer and speaks to you?) Made this list over these two devices is a real shame.

@G_Stewart@ChuckxJ@DMMP If you read the article, you will find that it is on this list not because its a game console, but the fact that it can do things like Skype and allow TV through HDMI input. Aside from games this is a better choice for many people.

@DMMP To be fair, what does PS4 bring that is really new to the table that the Xbox One doesnt? The Xbox One does what the PS4 does and then some. The inclusion of Kinect is what really makes it stand out and why it would belong on a list like this.

Im with you on the Smoke detector though. Head scratching why that is on here

@G_Stewart@ChuckxJ@DMMP oh...my....goodness. Please do more research, man. Xbox One could play 1080p games, the developers decided to make a 720p version. Let me clarify, Xbox = 1080p. Developers decided to first do 720p.

But at the loss of FPS, which is more important than native 1080p! Call of duty ghosts for example runs at 1080p and 30fps but being a console fanboy you must appreciate the importance of screen lag ;)

@ChuckxJ@DMMP The Xbone won't play my games in native 1080P like my PS4 does. That's what made my decision for which game system to buy. Which one does that job the best. This list is a joke or written by a 62 year old who is amazed by a camera phone.

Well isn't this rubbish? The Xbox One, which is clearly being destroyed by the PS4 on every level (Higher specs, far less failure rates, greater popularity, extraordinary sales, more transparent policies (anti-DRM), supportive of the indies, and so forth) has made the list, rather than its superior, the Sony PS4?

Well... the writer of this article doesn't seem to have done much research.

HDCP permanently enabled on PS3 and PS4? The Introduction of Cinavia on the PS3?

If Sony were anti-DRM then you would be able to sell your digital game copies. You can't and they have instead imposed further restrictions on who can play your Digital titles.If Sony were anti-DRM you'd be able to play your disc-based games without the disc being in the disc-drive. Again, you can't.

Ironically, guess which company doesn't have or had previously planned to introduce a (flawed) DRM system that done away with a lot of these restrictions?

Meanwhile, you all parade under a banner of #4daGamurz ignorant of what Sony actually is, spewing propoganda against a company that it is in no way better than.

"supportive of the indies"

Pretty funny, seeing as MS have an Indie plan on Xbox One, and EVERY Xbox One can be used as a development kit? Also try to remember this: Microsoft had an indie system on 360 years before the PS4 ever came about.

The PS4 had a waaay higher failure rate than the Xbox One. Youtube and their forums confirm that.

Xbox One has just as much indie support as the PS4, if not more. (They had a program setup for indie devs months before launch for crying out loud.)

Xbox One is sold out almost everywhere, and sold just as much as the PS4 at launch, regardless of launch locations.

The reason the Xbox One made this list is because it brings more to the table than the PS4. The PS4 is a great gaming device don't get me wrong, but it's just that, I GAMING DEVICE. No more, no less.

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What I don't understand is why PS4 fanboys (such as yourself) find that they have to bring down competitors at any chance they get, and glorify Sony as if it's their religion. Just enjoy your damn console and STFU, Jesus.

@balramrules why is it that Sony fanboys always have to be arrogant? PS4 brought nothing new to the table. It brought only improvements. Higher graphics, better processor, more RAM. Yay! Xbox brought a system with three operating systems (Xbox OS, Windows Kernel, and Hypervisor) that allows it to optimize when Xbox needs more power, it'll take less resources on the other two operating systems, which also allows it to do multitasking. The Kinect not only tracks the skeletal system, it senses where the muscles are using the most force. It also sees the orientation of the body (if it is sideways, front or back), and can see the heartbeat. It is really good especially for the P90X type stuff. Not only that, when in dark rooms, the IR allows you to still see in the dark when skyping someone. There is just so much more. It really shows how much Microsoft made a progress with innovation compared to Sony with their PS4.

@balramrules This isnt the "whos leading in sales right now" list. The Xbox One does what the PS4 does and then some. And with Kinect included, it absolutely deserves to be on this list. Quit being such a fan boy.

@ChuckxJ@balramrules Xbox tried to ruin the gaming industry. Money$oft IS NOT a gaming company, and shouldn't be supported. The Xbone is a ugly black VCR/Cable box that wants to play 720p games. By defending it, you yourself, are a fanboy.

Well obviously you have no idea what your taking about, the spec difference isn't noticeable! Seriously! In terms of spec my 4 year old PC has better specs! You can but tablets with better spec than the ps4! Read the terms and conditions on your ps4! Sony state they can withhold the rights to trade games in and you don't actually own the right to sell the games! So the irony of this? You have done no research! Well done for making yourself look like and idiot! (Y) oh and sonys claim of supporting indie games? Yeah is that why every xbox one console can be used as a dev kit? How a lot games coming out on the ps4 have already came out on the xbox 360? Yeah buddy! I don't support sony as they've stolen pretty much every brilliant idea Nintendo have came up with and if it wasn't for sony doing Nintendo over with the snes Cd crap you wouldn't have a console! Sony are scum! At least Microsoft were wanted to support sega with a partnership with the original xbox! What did sony do? Oh yeah leach off the industry! You enjoy the minute differences in console ;) I'm sure sony completely appreciate your loyalty!

@dukezap1@ChuckxJ@balramrules Just to Clarify. 1) Sony is no more a "gaming company" than Microsoft and they're in the industry to market their disc formats. 2) The industry is already going into ruins that's why PUBLISHERS wanted DRM in the first place. Sony originally was also going to have it. 3) Having functionality beyond just playing games does not make the Xbox less of a console that is backwards logic.

@balramrules Xbox made the list because Microsoft actually took a step in a direction (whether or not it's forward is a matter of opinion). Hate it or love it, It's a media hub for the living room. Sony didn't really do much other than make a last gen console on crack and pretend like they invented GDDR5.

@dukezap1@hav.fun93@balramrules You realize that sony rushed the ps4, not enough were built for the demand. Microsoft built enough for the demand so the xbox being sold out to ps4 is not really something that should be on your list, that just sounds stupid.

@ChuckxJ@balramrules If anything, you're the one being the fanboy right now. He listed 6 reasons why the PS4 was better and the only thing you managed to pick up from that was "who's leading the sales"? You are a retard.